Thirty seconds of it, and Roke's bull-like endurance went to pieces under the strain. Raucously and blubberingly he screeched for mercy. The Jap continued happily to exert the cross-pull pressure. "Will you speak up?" queried Brice, sickened at the sight, but steeling himself with the knowledge of the captive's crimes and of the vast amount at stake. Roke rolled his eyes horribly, grinding his yellowed teeth together to check his own cries. Then, sobbingly, he blurted: "Yes! Lemme loose!" "Not till you tell," refused Gavin. "Quick, now!" "Second panel from left-hand window," moaned the stricken and anguished Roke. "Push beading up and then to right. He's--he's safe away, by now, anyway," he blubbered, in self-justification of the confession which agony had wrung from him. "All you'll get is the--the--" And, the pain having eaten into his very brain, he yelled incoherently. Ten minutes later, Milo Standish sought out his sister, in the upper room whither she had fled, in fear, to escape from the racket of Roke's outcries. "Listen!" he jabbered boyishly, in utter excitement. "Brice made him tell how Rodney got out! How d'you s'pose? One of the old panels, in the music room, slides back, and there's a flight of stone steps down to a cellar that's right alongside our regular cellar, with only a six inch cement-and-lath wall between. It leads out, to the tunnel. Right at that turn where the old-time shoring is. The shoring hides a little door. And we never dared move the props because we thought it held up the tunnel-roof. It's all part of the old Indian-shelter stunts that this house's builders were so daft about, a hundred years ago. Hade must have blundered on it or studied it out, one of those times when he used to go poking around in the tunnel, all by himself. And--" "Did Mr. Brice find him?" interposed Claire. "Not he!" said Milo, less buoyantly. "Rodney had a good ten minutes start of us. And with a start like that, they'll never lay hands on him again. He's got too much cleverness and he knows too many good hiding places. But Brice found the next best thing. You'd never guess! Rodney's secret cache for the treasure was that walled-up cellar. It's half full of canvas bags. Right under our feet, mind you, and we never knew a thing about it. I supposed he was shipping it North in some way. Roke says that Rodney kept it there because, when he got it all, he was going to foreclose and kick us out, and then dispose of it at his leisure. The swine!" "Oh!" "The crypt seems to have been a part of our own cellar till it was walled off. It--" "But how in the world did Roke?"